Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

You don’t meet the threshold of being a teachers’ union unless you do two things: 1) hold a rally in front of the state capitol; and 2) file a school funding lawsuit against the state.

The Indiana State Teachers Association filled the #2 box last April, and Marion Superior Court Judge Cale Bradford tossed out the suit this week. ISTA will certainly appeal the ruling, if only to avoid ostracism.

Sometimes you have to go all the way to Guam to find entertaining news about teachers’ unions. Here is a series of items about the AFT-affiliated Guam Federation of Teachers and its failure to pay the health insurance premiums of some members – who are now receiving bills and collection agency threats from the HMO.

1) The story breaks.

2) The union responds.

3) The HMO reveals the union was warned well in advance, but the members were never notified.

4) Damage control.

Click here to read:

1) Union Membership Falls Sharply in 2006
2) Introducing EIA Video Intercepts
3) Return of the Prodigal Subscribers!
4) Take 2: Call for Substitutes
5) Prince of Wales Accedes to CTA Presidency
6) Last Week’s Intercepts
7) Quote of the Week

I’m having trouble embedding it here, but EIA’s Video Intercept for February 2007 is running happily over on the main page at http://www.eiaonline.com and will remain there until I make a new one.

So check it out. I hope you enjoy EIA’s latest feature.

I’ve got something special in the works for Monday. I may be wrong, but I haven’t found anyone else in the education policy world doing it, and certainly not in this form. A cryptic tease, but I hope on Monday you’ll find it was worth the wait and will recognize the possibilities for future application.

Welcome, EdWize readers! You’re here to see my entertaining “efforts at spin” over the fact that teachers in charter schools run by the city of Pembroke Pines, Florida, voted 181 to 46 to join the Broward Teachers Union.

The secret ballot election came after city commissioners decided not to automatically recognize the union after a card check submission.

The results prompted United Federation of Teachers official blogger Leo Casey to pen this thoughtful prose:

“But this should be the end of the blogosphere controversy about how
teacher union ‘thugs’ use ‘card check’ recognition to force ‘compulsory
unionism’ on ‘unsuspecting, naive teachers.’ Or it would be if evidence
mattered.

“We are not holding our breath. But see for yourself, at the sites
which have given much ink to the Broward organizing efforts in the past, as they
spun their tale of teacher union ‘thugs’ misleading Broward teachers. Go to the
New York Charter School Association’s blog, Chalkboard, the National Alliance for
Public Charter Schools’ Charter Blog, Michael Antonucci’s blog, Intercepts, and the State Policy Network blog, to name just a few of the more prominent cases. If nothing else, the efforts at spin should be entertaining.”

I’ll let those other blogs speak for themselves, but a quick check of my archives shows I’ve never described anyone associated with a teachers’ union as a “thug,” never used the term “compulsory unionism,” and never referred to “unsuspecting, naive teachers.” (A Google search of the latter phrase suggests no one but Leo has used it in the Internet era.) So much for scare quotes.

I’ll let Leo stick to the argument that the outcome of a secret ballot election is a reason for not holding one. But let’s not pretend that union organizing of charter schools has anything to do with “teacher voice.”

I quote:

“If we want to maintain our influence, our ability to do ANYTHING, we must make
sure that education remains a unionized industry…. If we lose our grip on the
labor supply to the education industry, we will bargain from a position of
weakness.”

That’s from a 2000 report from the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s Charter Schools Strategic Options Project, which I have posted on the EIA web site for your reading pleasure.